Call me old-fashioned but few things strike me as more compelling evidence of a genuine love for a country than, well, living in it.

Euromillions notwithstanding, I doubt I will ever avail myself of the advantages offered by more “tax-friendly” domains but I do understand their allure: they allow people who love money more than they love living in their own country to emigrate and so keep more of the former than they would otherwise have to pay to help support the latter.

It doesn’t matter that these people already have more money than any human being could conceivably need or that the massive majority of their considerably less well-off employees and customers back “home” will never be able to enjoy similarly self-enriching arrangements.

Which brings us to Sir Jim Ratcliffe. The Brexit-supporting economic migrant and tax exile has recently taken to talking down the UK, spouting spectacular and offensive falsehoods about fellow beneficiaries of immigration (in his case, to Monaco) and generally sounding like the uncle nobody wants to sit next to at Christmas. All when he’s not busy running Ineos, the twelfth largest chemical company in the world, or masterminding Manchester United’s dizzying ascent to twelfth in the Premier League.

Ratcliffe, of course, is as entitled to his opinions as your uncle. What is less obvious, and considerably more worrying, is why his “insights” into anything other than the lucrative benefits of tax exile, purchasing enough shares in a football club to gain control over “sporting operations” or running a chemicals company are afforded such weight and prominence. We would not, for example, seek Wayne Rooney’s advice on how to fly an aeroplane or ask Sir Alan Sugar to take over cooking duties in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Perhaps none of this would matter if Ratcliffe’s opinions were rooted in reality or even particularly interesting. Instead, and I think I have some authority when I say this, he sounds like the worst of ill-informed callers to a radio phone-in show. Even his favourite subjects are the same.

On Brexit: “As a business, INEOS supported the common market,” he said in 2016, “but not a United States of Europe.” This demonstrates how little understanding he has of the decision to join the “Common Market” in 1973. In an article marking the UK joining the Community, prime minister Ted Heath could almost have been addressing Ratcliffe directly. “The community which we are joining is far more than a common market,” he wrote. “It is concerned not only with the establishment of free trade, economic and monetary union and other major economic issues, important though these are — but also… with social issues which affect us all — environmental questions, working conditions in industry, consumer protection, aid to development areas and vocational training.”

So far, so phone-in, but Ratcliffe’s ignorance has rather wider impacts than that of most callers. In 2019, he had an opportunity to put his money where his mouth is and open a plant to build a new 4×4 vehicle in Wales. Indeed, a new factory was announced and excitement mounted near the proposed Bridgend site, where Ford was about to close a plant. Until, that is, Ineos announced in 2020 that it would be building the vehicle, and providing the jobs, at an existing factory in France instead, saying it was “a unique opportunity that we simply could not ignore”. An echo of Ratcliffe’s own migration from the UK to Monaco some four years after he publicly supported Brexit.

Speaking of de-investment, Ratcliffe announced yesterday that his company would be pausing production at three plants in Hull because of the high cost of gas. Some 4000 British jobs (including the wider supply chain) are reportedly at risk. This perhaps explained his unpatriotic belligerence at the weekend. Speaking in Denmark at the launch of the EU’s first carbon capture and storage system (CCS) – invested in by Ineos and subsidised by, wait for it, the EU – he claimed that the UK was “on the slide” because of high taxation and immigration.

Apparently, he wanted to develop the CCS in the UK but the high tax government was not supportive. Funnily enough, as Ratcliffe may not quite be aware, the OECD country with the highest tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is currently Denmark, while the UK sits well below most other western European countries.

Leaving aside the simple fact that he left the country for tax purposes four whole governments ago, the comments about immigration suggest he has learned nothing from the apology he was compelled to issue earlier this year when he, a migrant to Monaco, described the UK as having been “colonised” by migrants because the population had risen by 12 million people in just six years. It had not. The reported rise occurred over thirty years.

Imagine, for a moment, what might happen if Ratcliffe deployed similar levels of accuracy while manufacturing industrial chemicals. He would probably be in jail. But when he jabbers idiotically about immigration, red carpets are rolled out by most of our media and his errors reported in hushed tones.

This weekend, for example, he insisted once more that immigration must be reduced and added “nobody’s doing that”, apparently entirely unaware that the net figure has fallen from around 800,000 when Labour took office to 171,000 in the year to December 2025. It will, as Jim Ratcliffe is almost certainly unaware, have fallen still further when the latest figures are published.

I am not a businessman. I do not know how significant it is for a company like Ineos to have £18 billion of debt or to have seen its credit rating downgraded in February. But I do know that facts matter and that when it comes to Brexit, taxation and immigration, Sir Jim Ratcliffe is not and never has been in possession of them. So, perhaps we should all stop paying him so much attention. After all, he’s got a football team to fix.